I've already written about why the way educator's conduct their commentary is so important to the process in terms of building a positive and trusting relationship, and it is becoming more and more accepted that professors' commentary needs to move away from the perspective of strict critic to achieve this goal. But what about the initial objective? At a certain point, teacher commentary may become as ineffectual as friends' commentary may be, they both want to dance around the issues to establish or maintain a personal base with someone.
While overly directive commentary is a clear mistake, professors and consultants should be wary about becoming too facilitative. Facilitative commentary assumes that the writer always has the potential to write perfectly. The advisor hopes that by asking the right types of questions, the writer will be able to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, the students who need the help of the writing center most will not be able to fully capitalize on that type of discussion.
Of course, the consultant should never give specific new ideas to the writer, but at least by leading the writer into a certain train of thought they have a better chance of arriving at a conclusion that is both originally their own and better informed. I observed a writing consultant who enacted the following tactic: She would focus on a specific point in the text, ask the writer to reread it, neutrally vocalize some issues, and ask the writer to collaborate on how to improve that section.
The key part was that when the writing consultant referred to an issue, the issue was always a consequence, not the root. For instance, she would highlight a passage that felt awkward because of a specific grammatical issue but not point out the grammatical issue itself. This forced the writer to find her own mistake so that the combination of directive and facilitative commentary that the consultant adopted allowed for both the writer and the writing to improve. I was very impressed.
Professors and writing consultants need to mirror this type of smart balance in the way they comment on papers to foster win-win situations: Better papers and better students.
What balance do writers want, however?
ReplyDeleteI just commented on Katelin's blog about a study from UC Santa Barbara. I went to their presentation yesterday--four classes got studied.
The students ended in, in each case, preferring a rubric with generic advice for justifying/understanding the grade. When it came to commentary, however, they *also* wanted end commentary that gave an narrative sense of what should be done in the future.
In all four courses, marginal comments tended to help least, and these made writers think less of themselves as writers.
The study, however, did not look at whether facilitative or directive remarks got a more positive response from the UCSB students.